Dr Sue Pell
Interim Head of Communications & The Arts
Professor of Communications
Contact:
Email: susan.pell@richmond.ac.uk
School: School of Communications, Arts & Social Sciences
Research centres: The State Power & Globalisation
About
I joined Richmond in the Fall of 2012. Prior to that, I was a Visiting Fellow in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College (UL), where I researched social movement archives and documentation practices of radical political groups. This project was funded through a national Postdoctoral Fellowship (2011-2012) awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I hold an interdisciplinary PhD from Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada). My published work has appeared in international journals, and I have presented at conferences in the UK and abroad.
Research interests
My research focuses on public discourses, social movements, urban politics, and radical archives. I am interested in questions of collective identity, rhetoric and representations, public space and public spheres, and social transformation. As an interdisciplinary scholar, my research draws from the fields of communications, cultural studies, sociology, urban studies, and social and political theory. My work has focused on social housing and anti-poverty movements and the formation of publics, exploring emergent citizenship practices, public spheres, and possibilities for democratic participation.
My current work focuses on anti-gentrification campaigns in Vancouver and London. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in gentrification archives, I investigate the relationship between knowledge production and democracy, and bring together discussions of the politics of the archive with those of rights to the city. I am also interested in the relationship between research and activism, where I look at how these manifest in the university, archives and libraries, and social movements.
Teaching & learning
I teach on:
Communications and Sociology
Some of the courses I teach:
- COM 5200 – Mass Communication & Society
- COM 6296 – Senior Seminar in Communications I
- SCL 4110 – Gender and Culture
- SCL 5200 – Social Research
Qualifications
- Fellow of the Higher Education Academy
Research outputs
- “Social Justice and the Useful Past: Social Movements, Knowledge Production and Community Campaigns.” Chapter in Archives, Record-keeping and Social Justice, co-edited by Wendy Duff, Andrew Flinn and David A. Wallace. Surrey, UK: Routledge.
- 2020. “Documenting the Fight for the City: The Impact of Activist Archives on Anti-Gentrification Campaigns.” Chapter in Archives, Record-keeping and Social Justice, co-edited by Wendy Duff, Andrew Flinn and David A. Wallace. London, UK: Routledge.
- 2020. “Rethinking Canadian Democracy through Emergent Publics.” Chapter in Crossing Borders: Essays in Honour of Ian Angus, Beyond Phenomenology and Critique, edited by Samir Gandesha and Peyman Vahabzadeh. Winnipeg (CA): ARP Books.
- 2015. “Radicalizing the Politics of the Archive: Reading an Activist Archive.” Archivaria 80 (Fall): 33-57.
- 2014. “A Puzzle Constantly Changing Itself: Cultural Studies in the 21st Century.” Topia, 30-31: 310-318
- 2014. “Mobilizing Urban Publics, Imagining Democratic Possibilities: Reading the Politics of Urban Redevelopment in Discourses of Gentrification and Revitalization.” Cultural Studies 28 (1): 29-48.
- 2012. Co-authored with Emma Dowling, Anna Feigenbaum, and Katherine Stanley. “Occupy London.” South Atlantic Quarterly 111 (3): 608-615.
- 2012. Co-editor with Nick Mahony. “Creating Publics, Opening Democracies.” openDemocracy feature (October 1-7).
- 2010. Co-authored with Shaunna Moore. “Autonomous Archives.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 16 (4): 255-268.
- 2008. “Making Citizenship Public: Identities, Practices and Rights at Woodsquat.” Citizenship Studies 12 (2): 143-156.
- 2008. “Anxiously Entering into the 21st Century: Watching for Changes in Masculinity in Film.” Pp 505-512 in Pop Perspectives: Readings to Critique Contemporary Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill.
- 2006. Co-edited with Karl Froschauer and Nadine Fabbi. Convergence and Divergence in North America. Burnaby: Centre of Canadian Studies, Simon Fraser University.
- 2002. “Inescapable Essentialism: Bisexually-Identified Women’s Strategies in the Late 80s and Early 90s.” Thirdspace 2 (1).
